Alexander Williams, 14, puts a bag of non-perishable food in a cart for transfer to the Tualatin School House Food Pantry. Williams collected donations as part of the annual Boy Scouts "Scouting for Food" event with his fellow troop members Tyler Inberg (left), 16, and Jason Davis, 15. Andrea Castillo/The Oregonian

Tyler Inberg of Tualatin hauled bag after bag of canned and dry food into a minivan Saturday, his beige button-up Boy Scout shirt just barely peeking over his black pullover sweatshirt.

The day was intermittently rainy with the crisp Northwest cold that seems to set in every holiday season. It wasn’t a bad day for a food drive, said the 16-year-old, certainly not the worst in his experience of a ritual he remembers dating to his days as a Cub Scout.

Every first Saturday in December, Boy Scouts in Oregon and southwest Washington go “Scouting for Food.”

“I definitely enjoy it,” said Inberg, who estimates that he spends 200 hours a year doing volunteer work. “One of my favorite parts of Scouts is helping the community.”

In the largest one-day event organized by the Cascade Pacific Council, Scouts go door to door collecting the food-filled plastic bags they previously left at houses in their designated neighborhoods. Residents are instructed to leave nonperishable items by the front door for pickup.

Inberg, the senior patrol leader for Scout Troop 530 in Tualatin, was one of about 25 members who walked around the Southwest neighborhood collecting food for the Tualatin School House Pantry.

Having spent a lot of time volunteering at the pantry, Inberg, a junior at Tualatin High School, said the Boy Scout food drive is a worthy cause.

“When you realize that a third of your school uses the food pantry every day, that’s a big percentage,” he said. “It’s pretty sad.”

Tracy Smith, program coordinator with the food pantry, said Saturday that the organization helps about 650 families a month, a number that has doubled in the past three years. She said there are substantially fewer donations coming now than in the past.

Smith said the Boy Scouts’ event is the pantry’s largest holiday food drive every year. Last year, all of the holiday food drives brought in a combined 30,000 pounds of food, she said, though she is expecting significantly less this year. She said the food has to last until the next big drive, put on by Tualatin High School in April or May.

“When the economy first tanked, there was a big push to help,” she said. “Now that those hard times have gone on for so long, it’s not on the forefront of people’s minds anymore.”

All together, the troop collected 1,800 pounds of food, an increase from its total last year of about 1,200.

Jason Davis, 15, a sophomore at the high school, collected food along with Inberg. Davis said the event was a positive — in the wake of a negative image of Boy Scouts that has been projected nationally in recent years because of sexual abuse cases and the Scouts’ banning gay troop members and leaders.

“Boy Scouts policies aren’t exactly good for everybody,” he said. “A lot of the time we get bad national publicity but it doesn’t represent the individual troop.”